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“You always need Good Work in your life. At an organizational level, Good Work is vital. It is a company’s bread and butter—the efficient, focused, profitable work that delivers next quarter’s returns. Great Work Great Work is what we all want more of. This is the work that is meaningful to you, that has an impact and makes a difference. It inspires, stretches, and provokes. Great Work is the work that matters.”
― Michael Bungay Stanier, Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.

“As Jesus is reported to have said in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” This is the essence of what Jung means by individuation. It is a service not to ego, but to what wishes to live through us. While the ego may fear this overthrow, our greatest freedom is found, paradoxically, in surrender to that which seeks fuller expression through us. Enlarged being is what we are called to bring into this world, contribute to our society and our families, and share with others. It is wholly false to think that individuation cuts a person off from others. It cuts a person off from the herd, from collectivity, but it deepens the range in which more authentic relationships can occur. It may be necessary for us from time to time to absent ourselves from the world in order to reflect, regroup, or revision our journey, but ultimately, we are to bring that larger person back to the world. Jung describes the dialectic of isolation and community in this way: “As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.”5”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism struck his mother, Johanna, as wholly out of sync with life, or at least with hers. He was as difficult personally as he was philosophically, prone to long spells of depression and sudden fits of rage. He paid damages for twenty years to a woman he’d physically assaulted (she was talking too loudly outside his door). When Schopenhauer was twenty-six, Johanna wrote to her son, informing him of the obvious—he was impossible. She described the negative effects he had on his companions, suggesting that he move far away from her. He did. They never saw each other again. She died twenty-four years later. After being estranged from his second parent, Schopenhauer spent the remaining forty-six years of his life alone, cultivating a reputation as the Continent’s bachelor-turned-hermit. This is not to suggest”
― John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

“If there was any meaning to life, it had to be found in suffering. In 1850 Schopenhauer wrote: “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance.” Either suffering is the meaning of life, or there is no meaning of life.”
― John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are